A course in LETTERING: Part Two

50 ways to LOVE your LETTERS: A lightning tour of stylistic tweaks and playful manipulations that will give your letters personality, drama and spectacle.

In last week’s post we took a look at the basic typefaces—serif, sans serif and your natural handwriting and when to use them. There’s also resources on where to find complete alphabets to base your lettering on.

But obviously, there’s so much more to lettering than that.

This week we’re gonna look at 50 ways to spice-ify your lettering so you can develop your own DIY lettering-style to adapt to any project you’re working on.

After this short course, you’re gonna feel like you have an army of letters at your command, ready to march out onto the page to help you master any message you want to put in your art.

So let’s let the letters teach us what we can do with them.

But, “how,” you might ask, “can I free my letters?’

Well, let us let the letters tell us how to use them.

Basic stuff you can do to any letter

Outlines, drop shadows and 3D-ing your letters adds typographic punch.

How to: An outline is obvious, but, of course, you can’t outline a super-thin letter. The solid shape inside of an outline can either be a color or white. If you letter on top of a dark color, it’s best to draw the outline in white.

The principle of the drop shadow is that you create an exact duplicate of the letters and shift it off to the side. Drop shadows work best on big, fat letters rather than on thin, delicate letters. Typically, most drop shadows are shifted right and down, but for weird effects, you can shift them in any direction you want. If you’re working digitally, it’s super easy. Just copy the letters, put them on a new layer below and make them black or any other color you like. You can also blur them if you want to make your shadow more shadowy. If you’re hand lettering, you just have to use your eye to draw the drop shadow. I love drawing drop shadows, cause it’s a meditative unthinking task.

The 3D effect is just a drop shadow where you connect the corners of the drop shadow to the letter. (The visual tutorial below is optional—just use it if you need it .) If you 3D an outlined letter, you’ll get that superhero comic book effect. To create an even greater sense of mass you can make the faces on the bottom darker than the faces on the top and the sides. Thats what I did on the word EPIC above.

TOOLS and TEXTURE

C’mon, artist, c’mon doodler, grab any old tool under the studio lights to draw your letters. And use any old texture you can think of—crosshatching, slashing, smudging, scrumbling, herringbone, furriness, and so on. The only limit is your imagination. The point is that whatever tool or texture you use—like the samples I created below—will create a unique feeling in your art.

MOOD

Letters are visual, right? And visuals can create a mood, right? Which is why artists, calligraphers and sign painters have been creating letters with personality ever since some dude invented the alphabet. Below is a cheat sheet with some ideas of how you can depict a mood with your letters. For a fun exercise, pick an emotion or a feeling and depict it with letters. You’ll be surprised how easy it is—as long as you don’t pick an obscure emotion like schadenfreude or weltschmerz.

ORGANIZE your letters into a flash mob

Just like birds organize themselves into a flock to take a journey, letters string themselves together to make words and sentences. Typically, letters and words are organized into one horizontal line and then another line below that and so on (snooze), but instead, you can fit your letters into shapes that your reader will recognize. Those letter-made shapes will give your readers a little visual thrill that will go off in their head like a wind chime. It’s a twofer—a message and a shape of something.

Some shapes, such as arches, vertical stacks, or sideways 90 degree rotations are standard lettering devices that are frequently used, but you can also make up your own shapes, such as creating a bird out of the letters B I R D.

There you have it!

Four amazing lettering strategies that you can use for the rest of your artistic life.

1. Outline, drop shadows and the 3D effect

2. Use any tool or texture to add life to your letters

3. Use visual tricks to create moods in your letters

4. Organize your letters into shapes

Take my word for it, the letters you create will be proud of you for giving them a life on the page.

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If you want a PDF of this post (or the last one) buy me a cup of coffee, and I’ll send it to you. If you’re a paying subscriber or a comped subscriber, just let me know (no need for the coffee!) and I’ll email it to you. It might take me a couple of days to get it together so please be patient.

Just as I was about to publish this post, an amazing thing happened: A letter from letters arrived in the mail. I think it was written to you. Here it is.

This post felt like it took me forever. I have more to say about the letters, but maybe I should move on to other things? What do you think?

Seeya next week,

Your artist friend,

Josh

One last thing. Everyone has their own unique lettering styles. There are some Substack artists with amazing lettering styles that you can study and learn from. There’s the breezy, super-friendly, yet masterful lettering of Helen Stark’s The Time Forager’s Club that makes you feel like you’re peering into one of Darwin’s sketchbooks, or the wacky outlier lettering you can find in the Do It Ugly Project or the brash, eye-popping, attention-getting lettering of Zsofi Lang that kind of makes you feel like you’re in Times Square.

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#lettering